Hearing baptist spirituality in some conversion narratives from the American South: Baptist spirituality is conversionist spirituality. Baptist tradition insisted from the beginning that authentic churches are communities of gathered believers who convened to Christianity by voluntarily accepting Christ.

Believer's baptism, a signature trait in Baptist life, is a public manifestation of this principle. Revivalism increased conversion's impact on Baptist spiritual formation, particularly in the United States and especially in the American South.

The experiential pietism of the Great Awakening's revival preachers (1) influenced prorevival Puritans to require testimony to an inner experience of personal encounter with God as a normative sign of conversion. For those Puritans, true converts were saved, knew it, and talked (or wrote) about it. C. C. Goen called insistence on this form of personal conversion "the fundamental principal of the Great Awakening." (2) Heirs to both Puritan and pietist influences, Separate Baptists parlayed revival conversions into rapid church growth throughout the American South. (3)

Through time, Baptists in that region have molded this under standing of conversion as a publicly narrated, conscious turning from non-Christian to Christian life to a variety of theologies and practices, (4) but conversion language has remained vital to understanding Baptist spirituality in the American South. Baptist spirituality formed and was formed by a particular conversion language modeled in public witness. This aspect of Baptist spiritual formation can be traced partly by conversion testimonies in Baptist autobiographies.

Representative autobiographies of white Baptist clergy in the South before 1845 constitute the primary sources for this article. The authors, recording certain life events that they believed best revealed the divine-human encounter in their individual lives, consistently chose conversion as one of the two most important influences on their spiritual formation. (5) Incomplete in regard to gender and laity viewpoints, these writings nonetheless represent how the dominant religious culture's leadership perceived conversion in the spiritual formation of Baptists during its formative period.

Listening for Spirituality in Baptist Conversion Narratives

What these narratives of Baptist conversion tell us about Baptist spirituality depends largely on what the reader is listening for. Current readers and critics of this type of narrative often are frustrated or bored by the conventional language used in them. Daniel B. Shea called the content of early American autobiography "foreknown and predictable"; Virginia Lieson Brereton assumed such narratives are "impossibly burdened with stock religious language." (6)

Other modern readers listen, with scant success, for correlations between these witnesses 'and their own religious reality. For them, the importance of nonrational, affective, and intuitive evidence in conversion narratives is at best superfluous and at worst embarrassing. Such interpreters seek in this literature factual propositions embodying the objective reality of conversion as a universally true event (where "factual propositions" means words that correspond to the objective reality of the empirically verifiable world, and "true" means existing independently of the convert's subjective experience).

Historians face similar difficulties in trying to write "factual" histories. What does not fit easily into universally demonstrable principles of religious experience such as institutional growth, economic influences, doctrinal development, or other dynamics suitable to logical, linear assessment is usually discarded as unhelpful to understanding a religious tradition. (7)

Barton Stone, one of the founders of the camp meeting movement that revolutionized Baptist life in the American South, encountered conversion testimonies first among Virginia Baptists. Later recording "how and when they [the converts] obtained deliverance," he wrote:

Some were delivered by a dream, a vision, or some uncommon appearance of light--some by a voice spoken to them, "Thy sins are forgiven thee"--and others by seeing the Saviour with their natural eyes. Such experiences were considered good by the church, and the subjects of them were received for baptism.... (8)

Finding precious few objective realities corresponding with such experiences, historians have frequently treated what Stone thought central in Baptist conversion narratives as indicative of little other than humorous psychological aberrations.

A More-Than-Modern Methodology

Brad J. Kallenberg offers another way of listening to conversion narratives. Borrowing from Nancey Murphy and James William McClendon Jr.'s contributions to postmodernist distinctions, Kallenberg moves analysis of the conversion process beyond the "individualism, representationalism-expressivism, and foundationalism" of modern, Enlightenment-restrained interpretations. (9)

Individualism, or, as Kallenberg prefers, "metaphysical reductionism" assumes that the whole is no more than the sum of its parts. It sees conversion as the joining together of individuals into a group who share a common objective--not subjective--experience. In other words, the whole can be understood by separating and defining its constituent parts, as a chemist might seek to explain life by its molecular structure. In this view, individuals form community.

This view is not wrong so much as it is incomplete. A more comprehensive perspective recognizes the reality of the group or community as a living thing in itself. Community spiritual formation, in this analysis, would be more than the sum of common responses by a group of similar individuals; it would take account of the top-down influence of the community as it shapes individuals while being shaped itself. In this view, community forms the individual as well.

Representationalism-expressivism, or "linguistic reductionism" as Kallenberg identified it, is the assumption of a one-to-one correspondence between words and their referents. A statement is true to the extent that it points unerringly to the object for which it stands. Reality is that meaning residing in the object which is pointed to by language.

Again, this is not so much wrong as incomplete. It fails to give sufficient credit to the power of words to create as well as nominate, which is a concept as ancient as the creation story in Genesis, and as current as the healing powers of what is called "the placebo effect." Language shapes as well as describes experience. Accurate pointing and performing by words require historical perspective. The con-text, that which accompanies the text, is part of the meaning, truth, and power of words. Language has the power to create reality and give meaning, according to the context in which it is employed.

Foundationalism, or Kallenberg's "epistemological absolutism," is the view that certainty is obtained by building on foundational truths. Accordingly, a belief is justified to the degree it can be deduced from first principles. Knowledge thus grows by hierarchical development, layer by layer on the accepted foundations. In this view, conversion is a natural step forward through gradual understanding. Converts gradually understand; therefore, they switch beliefs.

Postmodernism challenges this incremental, linear conception of establishing truth; it asserts the interconnectedness of all things, including the interrelatedness of each belief within any one web of beliefs. The so-called foundational beliefs in a tradition depend for validity on acceptance of the entire constellation of beliefs. All beliefs are foundational in that one cannot be held with integrity apart from the others, if all are held to be true. To illustrate, Kallenberg employed Soren Kierkegaard's observation that reasoning never compels a paradigmatic change in belief, for to find a reason compelling enough to change one's very means of reasoning is itself evidence that a fundamental change in reasoning has already occurred. (10) Reason may weaken the hold of one paradigm on the seeker in the process of conversion, but it cannot break it. In Blaise Pascal's words: "The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it" (Pensees, IV, 267). In the end, there is no bridge across the divide between belief systems, though reason may lead the convert close enough to the edge to enable a leap of faith. Converts believe; therefore, they understand.

Conversions Before 1845

Ministers' nineteenth-century autobiographies before 1845 depict Baptist conversion as a movement from objective knowledge of religious matters to personal encounter with the divine. The converted, though retaining individual particularities, wrote of conversion as a holistic, voluntary personal process freely but inextricably interwoven with community.

Though the term "conversion" is commonly applied to the conscious recognition of this process in these writings, the conversions narrated in these sources are more process than punctiliar event. Each example fits a four-fold movement from (1) an objective works religion to (2) a sense of failure and a conviction of sin to (3) assurance in Christ and (4) continuing spiritual struggle. (11) Conversion advanced through time; apart from this, progression conversion was inexplicable. Recalling a ferryman's request for "the best and shortest way to heaven," Revolutionary War chaplain John Gano wrote:

   I told him that Christ was the best way; and that he must become
   experimentally acquainted with him, which was the hope of glory.... The
   shortest way that I knew would be to place himself in front of some army in
   an engagement. (12)

Each of the autobiographers considered in this period experienced intense inner turmoil for several months before being comforted by becoming one of the converted. Conscious recognition of this new status--the conversion event--was less significant than its accomplishment. Only William Hickman Sr. recorded the exact date of his conversion, and he himself did not recognize the moment of turning. (13)

Recalling his personal reconciliation with God, John Gano wrote that he "was not sensible that [he] thought of its being a real conviction" at the time. (14) In James Ireland's narrative, seventeen pages of troubles endured over several months separate the turning point of conversion and its conscious recognition. (15)

These narratives addressed the effects of conversion on the entire embodied personality of the convert, including social relations. The rational and the affective, the conscious and the unconscious, the spiritual and the physical, the ethical and the enigmatic received attention.

Conversion turned the head of the convert in these narratives. As a child, John Gano was summoned to religion by study; receiving at conversion an "enlightened mind" after years of seeking intellectual satisfaction. (16) John Taylor described the first effect of his conversion as a mind "instantly open to understanding." (17) Conversion in these sources connected to mature powers of reason. Taylor received a fourteen-year-old youth for baptism with some reservation, and refused two children, aged eight and ten, because he thought them too young to understand the experience. (18)

In these records, conversion penetrated the affective sphere and the intuitive faculties as well. Gano may have been summoned to religion by study, but a tear from his pious Baptist mother and anxiety over death in his family first convicted him of his deeper spiritual needs. These autobiographers commonly expressed tears and other open manifestations of emotion during their conversions. James Ireland recalled with rejoicing a time when

   the great deep of the barren fountain of [his] heart was then broke up,
   [his] head [he] could then say was like to a well of water, whilst the
   tears from the two fountains of [his] eyes ran down for several hours
   without intermission. (19)

These converts carefully analyzed the tender feelings elicited by means of communication best suited for addressing the intuition and imagination. Of poetry created at the urging of a Christian friend, Ireland wrote, "I shall have reason to bless God all eternity for it, its being the means, in the hand of the spirit, of my awful convictions of sin before God." (20) And a verse from a hymnal brought John Taylor assurance of salvation. (21) Though wary of unbridled emotion--William Hickman Sr. and Taylor carefully noted they did not actually "hear voices," and Ireland argued against his tears being "accounted as wild enthusiasm (22)--these writers refused to wall off their emotional and intuitive selves from their conversion experiences.

Spirituality in these conversion narratives also included altered perceptions of physical reality. At conversion, Hickman thought everything praised God, "even the trees, grass and brutes." (23) The conviction of sin "had a very considerable influence upon [Ireland's] exterior appearance of body," and assurance of salvation occasionally resulted in "plainly visible" alterations in countenance. (24)

These converts viewed entry into Christian life as necessarily free and voluntary. Hickman's wife was fond of her spiritual guide, "but she could not pin her faith to his sleeve." (25) John Gano would not act on the word of his soul friend as "divine warrant" for "this was not the way [Gano] had obtained the hope of salvation." (26) And James Ireland, despite affirmation of his conversion by his community and an ordained minister, felt he must reject its validity "unless the Lord applied it and established it in [his] heart." (27)

Ireland's guarded acceptance of external opinion accentuated the intimacy and initiative of God's role in conversion present in these narratives. Conversion began as "the arrows of conviction were shot deep by the hand of God," (28) and, for Hickman, ended as "God by his holy spirit" sent faith home to the heart, giving personal knowledge of divine-human relationship. (29) Ireland interpreted all earthly channels of grace as circumstances made "the very means in the hands of his spirit to awaken" persons. (30) God alone ultimately gave authentication to the seeking sinner. Of this vital point, James Ireland wrote regarding the day he received assurance of salvation:

   Through the greatest part of the day was I painfully and laboriously
   engaged to force my heart to believe on Jesus Christ and to throw myself
   upon him so as to derive comfort from him and salvation in him. It would
   appear almost incredible for me to tell how often I would drop from my feet
   upon my knees in order to affect what I went out resolutely determined to
   perform. At last it pleased God to give me to see that salvation was by
   grace through faith, and that not of myself, for it was the gift of God....
   Then was I led to cry to God to grant me that divine faith which I could
   not produce in myself. (31)

If conversion occurred between a voluntary seeker and a gracious God, its disclosure came only within the web of social relationships. Conversion was an intimate and personal encounter with inescapable social dimensions. Individual spiritual friends played a vital role in these conversions by giving interpretations that made the process understandable. Ireland sought spiritual advice from a trusted preacher. He was told "that [he] ought to be thankful to God and place [his] confidence in him; that in the judgment of charity [he] was converted and had experienced a gracious change from God." (32) John Taylor discovered he was converted in conversation while talking to his friend, Isaac Reding. Wrote Taylor, "He, by exhorting some answers from me, pronounced me a child of grace, according to his own experience." (33)

As valuable as individual spiritual guidance was in these conversion testimonies, corporate guidance by the gathered community was more important. (34) The interpretation, clarification, and validation of conversion by mutual or group guidance is typical of churches that hold to the Reform doctrine of the priesthood of believers, (35) and the Baptists under consideration had a vice-like grip on that principle.

Worship sometimes provided a means for awakening. The words of sermons and the images of baptism were vital to Hickman's conversion. (36) Both John Taylor and James Ireland first found affirmation of their progress in spiritual formation among the fellowship of believers to which each belonged. (37)

Congregations met regularly to hear testimonies of seekers. These meetings were opportunities for new believers to improve their understanding of their particular experiences by comparison with the combined experience in the community. Individuals brought their raw religious experience and the community labored to help them sort it out. The congregation exercised this mutual responsibility for one another's welfare without removing the individual's ultimate responsibility for spiritual formation under God.

Auditing Baptist Conversion Narratives for a Balanced Spirituality

The study of Christian spirituality interprets, for better or worse, the experiences of those who seek to align their lives with the mystery of Christ in the church community through the gift of the Holy Spirit. This study's object concerns experiential, personal, communal, and transcendent factors. (38) How are these exhibited in the conversion process of nineteenth-century Baptist autobiographies?

First, the interplay of individual and community is, in these narratives, a necessary but not all-sufficient territory for full realization of the individual, convert's coming to terms with the personal transcendent. The narratives seem to implicitly agree with Cyprian's enduring phrase: "One cannot have God for father who has not the church for mother" (De Cath. Eccl. Unitate, vi). The narratives are somewhat fixed and formulaic, but, by being so, they provided a common language of conversion to a community of believers from an individualistic, freedom-loving Baptist tradition living in the open, diverse religious setting of post-Awakening America. The writings provide the vocabulary for interaction between the seeker and the evangelizing community.

This common language left the individual final accountability in human terms for interpreting and responding to the actions of the unseen transcendent, but by its imperative to write and speak with existing believers as part of the process, became itself a powerful medium of trans forming creativity by the community. Without community interaction, individual conversion did not come to full expression, even in the consciousness of the converted. The convert needed the church for individual spirituality to reach its first step toward Christian formation, illustrated and sealed by baptism.

Second, the conversion language common to the Baptist community to which these autobiographers belonged provided ample flexibility for the multiple dimensions of human experience encountered in the process. The narratives exhibit openness to intuitive avenues in conversion. Dreams, visions, and poetry had a rightful place. In psychological terms; the convert found communally accepted means to name the spiritual formation experienced by the unconscious self as well as the conscious self. What cannot be named cannot be reflected upon. The more experiences a religious language, such as that found in these conversion narratives, can provide vocabulary for, the more the convert can incorporate the totality of the conversion into his or her transformation. Baptist spirituality in these testimonies allowed its participants to remain free to explore more than the world lit by the sunlight of reason. It also permitted them to venture forth under the starlight of intuition and imagination.

Understood by these autobiographers to have worked in concert with and within the community of the church, the divine came with and in a narrative world carried by individual witness heard and understood, but not authorized, in community dialogue. Nineteenth-century Baptists heard in contemporary voices the shape of their tradition's turning to Christ, saw it in the disciplines of community accountability, and felt it embodied in salty tears. The way cleared by often-lengthy rational reflection on these things, converts found a spirituality open to the intuitive leap of faith.

Baptist spirituality within these narratives corresponds more to the broad-spectrum spirituality of the early church's catechetical spiritual formation (39) than to the narrower spirituality revealed in the abbreviated conversions encouraged by efficient revivalism among many twentieth-century Baptists. As Bill Leonard observed, "The lengthy struggles with sin and self that characterized early Regular and Separate Baptist conversions were reduced to sign posts on the way to instantaneous regeneration." (40)

Individual freedom and responsibility in personal encounter with transcendent grace, molded and authenticated by community spiritual guidance expressed in a common language capable of engaging the diversity of embodied human experience: these are hallmarks of the spirituality heard in the conversion narratives of early nineteenth-century Baptist clergy in the South.

(1.) The pietist affinities of the First Great Awakening came to American revivalism indirectly from the Pietism of Phillip Jacob Spener and Auguste Herman Francke through Nikolas Ludwig von Zinzendorf's Moravians to John Wesley and George Whitefield's revival preaching.

(2.) C. C. Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 4.

(3.) William L. Lumpkin, Baptist Foundations in the South: Tracing Through the Separates the Influence of the Great Awakening, 1754-1787 (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1961).

(4.) See Bill J. Leonard, "Southern Baptists and Conversion: An Evangelical Sacramentalism" in Ties that Bind: Life Together in the Baptist Vision, ed. Gary Furr and Curtis W. Freeman (Macon, Ga.: Smyth & Helwys Publishing, Inc., 1994), 9-22.

(5.) Calling to ministry was the other.

(6.) Both authors are quoted in Rodger M. Payne, The Self and the Sacred: Conversion and Autobiography in Early American Protestantism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998), 9.

(7.) On this dynamic in Baptist history, see Wm. Loyd Allen, "Mining Baptist History and Traditions for Spirituality: Paradigm Sifting for Ores of a Different Color," Perspectives in Religious Studies 25 (Spring 1998): 43-61.

(8.) Barton Warren Stone, The Biography of Eld. Barton Warren Stone, Written by Himself: With Additions and Reflections by Elder John Rogers (Cincinnati: n.p., 1847), 5.

(9.) Brad J. Kallenberg, "Conversion Converted: A Postmodern Formulation of the Doctrine of Conversion," Evangelical Quarterly 67, no. 4 (1995): 345, cites Nancey Murphy and James Wm. McClendon Jr.'s "Distinguishing Modern and Postmodern Theologies," Modern Theology 5 (April 1989): 191-214.

(10.) Kallenherg, 363.

(11.) This four-fold model was standard in earlier Puritan conversions. See Bill J. Leonard, "Getting Saved in America: Conversion Event in a Pluralistic Culture," lecture, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky, May 4, 1983; or Dean Ebner, Autobiography in Seventeenth-Century England: Theology and the Self (Paris: Mouton, 1971), 53-71.

(12.) John Gano, Biographical Memoirs of the Late John Gano (New York: Southwick and Hardcastle, 1806), 69.

(13.) William Hickman Sr., A Short Account of My Life and Travels. For More than Fifty Years: A Professed Servant of Jesus Christ, to Which Is Added a Narrative of the Rise and Progress of Religion in the Early Settlement of Kentucky: Giving an Account of the Difficulties We Had to Encounter, etc. (Frankfort, Ky.: n.p., 1828), 3-4.

(14.) Gano, 19.

(15.) James Ireland, The Life of the Reverend James Ireland, comp. J. Foster (Winchester, Va.: J. Foster, 1819), 104-21.

(16.) Gano, 12 and 19.

(17.) John Taylor, A History of Ten Baptist Churches of Which the Author Has Been Alternately a Member in Which Will Be Seen Something of the Author's Life for More Than Fifty Years (Frankfort, Ky.: J. H. Holeman, 1823), 13.

(18.) Ibid., 175-76.

(19.) Ireland, 9.

(20.) Ibid., 58.

(21.) Taylor, 297.

(22.) Hickman, 3; Taylor, 297; and Ireland, 94.

(23.) Hickman, 4.

(24.) Ireland, 83 and 100.

(25.) Hickman, 2.

(26.) Gano, 21.

(27.) Ireland, 120.

(28.) Ibid.

(29.) Hickman, 3.

(30.) Ireland, 75.

(31.) Ibid., 103-04.

(32.) Ibid., 120.

(33.) Taylor, 296

(34.) Allen, "Spiritual Discernment, the Community, and Baptists," Ties That Bind: Life Together in the Baptist Vision, ed. Gary A. Furr and Curtis W. Freeman (Macon: Smyth & Helwys Publishing, Inc., 1994), 109-26.

(35.) John T. McNeill, A History of the Cure of Souls (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), ix.

(36.) Hickman, 3.

(37.) Ireland, 120; Taylor, 196.

(38.) Sandra M. Schneiders, "The Study of Christian Spirituality: Contours and Dynamics of a Discipline," Christian Spirituality Bulletin 6 (Spring 1998): 3-4.

(39.) See the brief description of this process in E. Glenn Hinson, The Evangelization of the Roman Empire (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1981), 72-84

(40.) Bill Leonard, "Southern Baptists and Conversion," 17.

William Loyd Allen is associate dean and professor of church history and spiritual formation at the McA fee School of Theology, Mercer University, Atlanta, Georgia.